Dan Agronow is chief technology officer for The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc. which operates the weather.com®, the website of The Weather Channel and supports their industry leading Desktop and Mobile weather applications. Additionally he supports web sites recently launched in the area of Vacation Home Rentals (forGetaway.com), Climate & Green Living and International weather websites. Agronow has overall responsible for the technology infrastructure and the Project Management, Architecture, Application Development, Testing, Site Operations and Business Application Support teams.

Agronow joined The Weather Channel Interactive in 2000 and was the champion for Open Source software, leading the infrastructure transformation that has given the weather.com® website capacity to manage severe weather events, while significantly reducing the technology budget. He played a key role in vendor negotiations that along with the open source architecture has resulted in a highly scalable, cost effective website. Agronow earned his bachelor's degree in engineering, computers and informational sciences from the University of Florida.

Andrew Aitken is co-founder and managing partner of Olliance Group, the leading open source management consultancy. He is a recognized expert on strategies for the commercialization of open source and has been a leader in the open source community for nearly 10 years. Andrew has more than 20 years senior management experience in building and leading national professional services firms, including Renaissance Worldwide and eWork.

In 2001 Mr. Aitken founded Olliance Group with other industry veterans to provide management and business strategy consulting to companies leveraging open source. In January 2006, Mr. Aitken spearheaded the software industry's first "think tank" on the future of commercial open source, now an annual event regularly attended by the industry's leading CEOs and visionaries. Andrew is on the Board of Advisors of SugarCRM, Funambol, Cleversafe, and Krugle. He has personally advised firms such as IBM, Intel, Nokia, Microsoft, and dozens of VCs and startups on their open source strategies.

Mr. Alston is responsible for leading the strategic direction and operations of IONA's open source business, which was established in April 2007, after leading the acquisition of LogicBlaze, a leading provider of open source solutions for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Under Mr. Alston's leadership, IONA successfully built on the LogicBlaze brand and technology to establish the FUSE™ family of open source products.

Prior to his appointment as vice president and general manager Open Source, Mr. Alston held a number of senior level roles at IONA including vice president Corporate Strategy and Product Management and Worldwide Marketing. He brings 20-plus years of product management, marketing, and engineering experience to IONA having held leadership positions with companies including Bachman Information Systems, C-bridge Internet Solutions, eXcelon Corporation, and most recently Pantero Corporation. Mr. Alston holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, and an MBA from Northeastern University.

Matt Asay has been involved with open source since 1998, and is one of the industry's leading open source business strategists. Asay currently manages sales and business development activities in the Americas for Alfresco, the open source leader in Enterprise Content Management.

Prior to Alfresco, Asay co-founded Novell®'s Linux Business Office and was an early agitator and architect for the company's shift to open source. In 2003 Asay founded the Open Source Business Conference, the industry's premier open source strategy event, and has served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Thomas Weisel Venture Partners. Before Novell, Asay was General Manager at Lineo®, an embedded Linux software startup, where he ran Lineo's Residential Gateway business. Asay earned his Juris Doctorate degree at Stanford Law School, spending two of his three years studying software licensing and innovation. He holds Master's and Bachelor's degrees from the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK) and Brigham Young University, respectively.

Matthew Aslett covers relational and non-relational databases and other data management software for The 451 Group. Matthew is also an expert in open source software and contributes regularly to reports produced through the 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service, as well as to the 451 CAOS Theory blog.

Prior to joining The 451 Group, Matthew was deputy editor of monthly magazine Computer Business Review and ComputerWire's daily news service. There he covered Linux and open source software and launched the successful Open Source Weblog in January 2006. Matthew started in IT journalism in 1997 as a staff writer with monthly magazine Unix and NT News, where he became editor in 2000. He has also contributed to a number of other publications, including Unigram/X, IBM System User and JavaVision. Matthew holds a B.A. in Multimedia Journalism from Bournemouth University in the UK.

Andy Astor is CEO of EnterpriseDB, the world's most advanced open source database company. Previously, he was vice president at webMethods, leading the company's open source, standards, and Web services strategies. While at webMethods, Andy was elected twice to the Board of Directors of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS I), and led WS I's marketing efforts.

Prior to joining webMethods, Andy was vice president at D&B, where he led worldwide development of on-line products. His work at D&B included the development and launch of one of the earliest commercial Web services. He also led product development and client services at Magna Software, and managed large systems integration projects at American Management Systems and Ernst & Young. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Andy received his B.A. in Mathematics from Clark University and his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Larry Augustin is an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Compiere, Fonality, Hyperic, Medsphere, Pentaho, SugarCRM, and XenSource. One of the group who coined the term "Open Source," he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs in 2000. From 2002 to 2004 he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ:LNUX), where he served as CEO until August 2002. While CEO he launched SourceForge.net and led the company through an IPO in 1999. Larry can be found online at http://lmaugustin.com.

Virginia Badenhope is an associate at Smithline Jha LLP, a San Francisco law firm focusing exclusively on technology transactions and global outsourcing. Our clients range from venture funded start-ups to industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Electronic Arts and Polycom. Open source advising is a significant part of our practice. We advise manufacturers of proprietary software and hardware products in their use of open source, help F500 companies create and maintain open source usage policies and represent open source solution providers such as MuleSource and GroundWork.

Prior to joining Smithline Jha, Virginia was a corporate and securities associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and contract corporate counsel at VERITAS Software Corporation (later merged with Symantec Corp.) Virginia received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Stanford University and a Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School. Virginia is admitted to practice in California and Massachusetts.

Jean Barmash is the director of Services at Alfresco Software, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management Company. In that role, his responsibilities include architecture and hands-on development of content centric solutions, training, and working with open source and Alfresco partner community. Jean brings a wealth of experience in different areas of technology creation. Most recently, he consulted to several Wall Street firms and ran a technology training program for one of the leading investment banks. Well-versed in both .NET and Java, he is interested in the ideas of Web 2.0 and bringing that innovation into the Enterprise. He is a frequent speaker at user groups and code camps and has published several articles.

Rob Bearden has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, with a track record for building strong, global sales organizations and operations. Most recently he served as chief operating officer for OpenSpan, a desktop integration software provider, responsible for global sales, marketing, business development and administration.

Previously, as chief operating officer for JBoss, an open source middleware pioneer, he helped architect and execute the company's business model, managed its worldwide operations, and played a key role in its acquisition by Red Hat Software (NYSE: RHT). Prior to JBoss/Red Hat, he was president of the Americas at i2 Technologies, a supply chain software provider, overseeing operations in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Mexico. He also served as senior vice president of worldwide sales for Manhattan Associates and spent six years at Oracle in various executive sales positions. Education: Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from Jacksonville State University.

James Bottomley is the CTO for SteelEye Technology, Inc. He is also an active member of the open source community. He is a Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port and the 53c700 driver. He has also made contributions to PA-RISC Linux development in the area of DMA/device model abstraction. He was born and grew up in the United Kingdom. He went to university at Cambridge in 1985 for both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees. He joined AT&T Bell labs in 1995 to work on Distributed Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 1997 he moved to the LifeKeeper HA project. He has spoken before at LinuxWorld, ALS, OLS and the Kernel Summit.

John P. Brockland is a partner in the Technology Transactions practice group and a member of the Cooley Godward Kronish Business department. He joined the Firm in 1999 and is resident in the Palo Alto office. He regularly prepares and negotiates agreements for strategic alliances, technology development agreements, software and semiconductor licensing transactions, information technology and business process outsourcing arrangements, and electronic commerce transactions. He also counsels clients on the intellectual property aspects of mergers, acquisitions, and financings and on issues related to open source licensing models.

Mr. Brockland has experience representing companies ranging from startups to multinational public companies in the software, hardware, semiconductor, and internet industries. Prior to law school, Mr. Brockland worked as a consultant developing and implementing computer systems for a leading multinational consulting firm. Mr. Brockland received a J.D. with honors in 1996 from the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Brockland is a member of the State Bar of California.

Roger Burkhardt serves as Ingres' president and CEO. In this role he is responsible for all facets of the company's worldwide business. He also serves on the company's Board of Directors. Previously, in addition to his role as president, Burkhardt served as Ingres' COO, with responsibility for corporate strategy, development, engineering, and global field operations including marketing, sales and support, alliance and channels, and customer programs.

Mr. Burkhardt joined Ingres from the New York Stock Exchange, where, as CTO and EVP for six years, he led a global technology team of 2,000 colleagues through the most important business and technology transformation in the Exchange's history: the shift to electronic trading. Under his leadership, the NYSE embraced open source solutions, maintained world-class reliability standards, and increased transaction volumes seven-fold. He holds an MBA in finance from New York University and both a bachelor's and master's degree in Physics from Oxford University.

Fabrizio Capobianco is CEO of Funambol, Inc., the #1 open source mobile email and PIM synchronization solution for the mass market. Fabrizio is a serial entrepreneur and veteran executive, with work experience that includes stints at Reuters and Tibco. He founded the first Italian Web company, Internet Graffiti, in 1994. He also founded Stigma Online, a developer of an information portal product with customers that included Kraft, Novartis, Italian Broadcasting Television and the Italian Stock Exchange. Capobianco has taught university courses on mobile and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pavia, Italy. Fabrizio has been recognized as a top high tech leader and for being a mobile email visionary. He writes a mobile open source blog that was voted among as one of the best in the wireless industry.

As COO, Neelan Choksi focuses on growing SpringSource's business throughout the world and broadening the company's product and service portfolio around the popular Spring Framework.

Neelan has spoken extensively about the business of open source, middleware software, and about entrepreneurship at a variety of events including the keynote at 2006 The Spring Experience, OSCON, BEAWorld San Francisco, South By Southwest Interactive, and a variety of other events.

Stuart Cohen is the chief executive officer of CSI. A seasoned IT executive with 25 years of international business experience, Cohen is responsible for marshaling CSI's leadership team and IT business and technology leaders to apply open source methodologies to software development and business communities.

Previously, Cohen served as chief executive officer at Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), which merged with the Free Standards Group to form The Linux Foundation. In Cohen's four years as the senior executive at OSDL, he more than tripled the Labs' vendor membership and formed Linux User Advisory Councils (LUACs) in three geographies to bridge vendors, users and the community, helping Linux grow from an emerging market opportunity to a mature market success. Prior to his post at OSDL, Cohen was vice president at RadiSys Corporation, where his responsibilities included sales, marketing and developing strategic partnerships within the technology industry. Cohen holds a B.S. in Quantitative Business Analysis from Arizona State University.

Russ Danner is a manager of software development at Christian Science Monitor and The First Church of Christ Scientist where he is engaged in enterprise architecture and moving Open Source to the forefront of the organization's technical approach. Russ has been developing production grade software for over 10 years in C++, Java and other niche languages. Prior to joining the CSPS (Christian Science Publishing Society), Russ worked as a developer in process control engineering / industrial automation at Carpenter Technology Corporation; a specialty alloys manufacturer. Russ is an active community member and committer of several open source projects including Alfresco ECM and POSIT open source initiative. Russ blogs for The CXO Review and alfresca.blogspot.com.

Dr. Lothar Determann is a partner with Baker & McKenzie LLP in San Francisco and Palo Alto, California. Focusing on technology and international business law, his practice covers counseling technology companies on taking their R&D, products and contracts international, as well as software licensing, electronic commerce, data protection, intellectual property and outsourcing. Dr. Determann is admitted to practice in California and Germany. He teaches Computer Law, Data Privacy and Internet Law at UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), USF Law School and Freie Universität Berlin and is a member of the Association of German Public Law Professors since 1999. He has authored three books and over 40 articles, including Dangerous Liaisons - Software Combinations as Derivative Works? (21 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 14412006); and SCO v. Linux — A case study in the implications of upstream intellectual property disputes for software end users, Computer & Law International (2003, co-author: A. Coan). For more information see www.bakernet.com.

Mark de Visser has extensive experience and accomplishments in marketing open source software and software development tools. At Zend, the PHP Company, he is responsible for the company's overall market strategy, as well as for product marketing and corporate communications. Zend plays a key role in the adoption of PHP as a first-tier web application platform, and its open source PHP application framework (Zend Framework) and the open source PHP IDE (Eclipse PDT - PHP Development Tools) have gained enormous traction. Before Zend, de Visser was vice president of marketing at Red Hat Inc. where he was a member of the team that created the company's market-leading position with the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. He also worked for 12 years at Borland International in international and product marketing roles, and as vice president of corporate marketing.

Scott Dietzen is CTO of the Zimbra Business Unit at Yahoo! Inc. Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! in October 2007, and prior to acquisition Scott served as president and CTO at Zimbra, where he led the technological direction of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. In previous roles, Scott has been widely credited with helping put together the J2EE standard, launching the Web application server category and launching the Java Community Process. Prior to Zimbra, Scott was CTO of BEA Systems where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family.

Aaron is a multifaceted entrepreneur and technology advocate. He has held senior management positions at three technology startups and has helped to launch non-profits and businesses outside the technology industry. Aaron received his B.S. in Computer Science from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He worked for Microsoft Advanced Strategies and Policies on distributed systems and owned and operated a successful technology consulting firm. He is a recognized expert on communities, software, and open source and is regularly asked to speak on these topics at conferences and Universities.

Peter George is a partner with Baker & McKenzie LLP in Chicago, Illinois. Mr. George's practice focuses on counseling buyers and providers in global sourcing transactions and technology law, with particular emphasis on multi-jurisdictional outsourcing and offshoring transactions ranging from information technology infrastructure management and application development and maintenance to human resource administration and engineering services. Mr. George counsels clients in all phases of the outsourcing and offshoring cycle, from structure and due diligence through down select, negotiation, implementation and re-bid. Mr. George is admitted to practice in Illinois. He has served on the adjunct faculty of Northwestern University Law School, co-teaching courses on international law and outsourcing. For more information, see www.bakernet.com.

Derek Gottfrid is a senior software architect at the New York Times. He was involved in building many key parts of the nytimes.com infrastructure, including search, web serving, e-mail distribution, and platform development. Derek has led efforts to improve the use of open source software within the Times and is responsible for the open source project dbslayer -- a database connection pooling server. He also blogs regularly about his open source work at open.nytimes.com.

Gautam Guliani is a software architect and developer with over 15 years of experience developing web-based solutions to business problems in publishing, finance and education areas. He currently works as Executive Director, Architecture at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a Washington Post company. At KTPA, Gautam is responsible for technical design of all enterprise systems and integration amongst them. Gautam specializes in promoting and managing effective use of mature open source technologies in the enterprise and is the author of a book on the subject with Oreilly. More info at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensourceent/

Gautam lives, works and plays in New York City with his wife and daughter and in his spare time desperately seeks ways to not refer to himself in third person.

Jason Haislmaier is a partner in the Technology and Intellectual Property Law Group of the law firm of Holme Roberts Owen (www.hro.com). He is also an adjunct professor of Copyright Law and Technology Contracting Law at the University of Colorado School of Law. Jason represents emerging and established companies in licensing and other transactions relating to the commercialization and procurement of technology and intellectual property, with a special area of emphasis on free and open source software licensing and compliance issues. He has helped clients in the US, Europe and Asia develop and implement open source compliance strategies, contend with third party open source compliance inquiries, and deal with open source issues in a variety of corporate transactions. He has lectured internationally on technology and intellectual property issues, including the practical and legal issues surrounding the interpretation of open source licenses under the copyright and intellectual property laws of the US and EU.

Chris Harrick is a senior director of product marketing at SugarCRM. Prior to joining SugarCRM, Chris held a variety of product marketing positions at Siebel Systems. Chris holds a B.A. from Boston College and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Sara Harrington is a partner in the technology transactions practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She focuses on counseling various companies involved in the development, distribution, licensing, disposition, and acquisition of technology and intellectual property rights for various start-ups and established enterprises.

Sara has represented clients in a wide range of industries, including those involved in search technology, business application software (both open source and private source), e-commerce (business-to-business and business-to-consumer), Web 2.0, entertainment/media industries, database services, consulting, networking devices, semiconductor, telecom, medical device, consumer goods, and audio services. She has constructed and negotiated a variety of international and domestic agreements, covering such areas as strategic alliances, marketing, development, licensing, advertising, distribution, services, outsourcing, open source, and manufacturing. She also has significant experience advising companies on intellectual property matters in connection with investments, financings, asset purchases and sales, corporate structuring (spin-outs), and mergers and acquisitions.

Jacob Harris is a senior software architect at the New York Times. He has been heavily involved in open source initiatives during his tenure at the Times. These have included replacing a proprietary web scripting framework with an open-source alternative, creating web applications as part of the Interactive News group, and blogging regularly about his experiences at open.nytimes.com. With coding requirements ranging from C++ to Ruby on Rails and a serious interest in scalable architectures, he has repeatedly seen how open-source has the strategic advantages for innovation and scale.

As CEO and member of the Board of Directors, Kelly provides the strategic leadership and vision for Vyatta and drives it through to rapid execution. Kelly has a proven track record for growing companies based on open source in the systems, embedded and telephony industries. Before joining Vyatta, Kelly was the SVP of Strategic Operations at MontaVista Software, the world's pre-eminent embedded Linux supplier, where he led the strategic focus into telecommunications equipment and mobile phones. Prior to joining MontaVista, Kelly was vice president of Marketing for Cobalt Networks, the dominant provider of open source-based server appliances for web hosting. After helping drive the company growth through an explosive IPO and beyond, he played a key role in driving its successful $2.3B merger with Sun Microsystems. Kelly holds a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in Marketing from Washington State University, and an MBA from Cornell University.

Dirk Hohndel has been an active developer and contributor in the Linux space since its earliest days. Among other roles, he worked as chief technology officer of SuSE and as vice president of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Dirk joined Intel in 2001. He works in the Software and Solutions Group and focuses on the technology direction of Intel's Open Source Technology Center and guides Intel's engagements in open source. He is an active contributor in many open source projects and organizations, various program committees and advisory boards. Dirk holds a Diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Dr. Ian Howells is chief marketing officer of Alfresco and has 20 years of enterprise software marketing experience in content management, service oriented architectures and relational database systems. Prior to Alfresco, Ian was responsible for managing worldwide marketing at SeeBeyond®. Ian was the first employee of Documentum® in Europe and held various technical and marketing roles in the 7 years he was there. In this time Documentum grew from a start-up to a $200m per annum company.

Prior to this Ian worked in marketing and technical positions at Ingres®. Ian has a B.A. in Computing and Statistics and a Ph.D. in Distributed Databases from University College Cardiff. Ian is a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the author of a number of books. He is recognized as an authority on open source marketing and publishes "The Open Source Barometer" (www.opensourcebarometer.org) and the "Open Source Marketing" blog.

James is a Sun Fellow and VP of Sun Microsystems. Currently the chief technologist of the Solaris Operating System, he has influence over the future direction of one of the most deployed operating systems in enterprises today. Formerly with StorageTek, Network Systems and Control Data Corp, he has over 32 years in the Storage and Networking industry.

Since helping to establish the first Oracle office in Washington, D.C. in 1981, Mr. Jacobs has been a prominent spokesperson for Oracle and an advocate inside the company for customers' interests. He has held a number of technical and management roles for Oracle, including consulting, support, product management and product marketing.

Mr. Jacobs has helped guide the development of the Oracle Database product, and he holds several patents for innovative database technology. His early work with a number of U.S. Department of Defense clients laid the groundwork for Oracle's leadership position in database security. From 1985-1993, he represented Oracle on the ANSI SQL Standards committee, and he subsequently represented Oracle on the Transaction Processing Council for two years. Known as "Dr. DBA" to thousands of Oracle Database administrators, he hosts an online radio program on Oracle's E-Business Network (/ebusinessnetwork/drdba), where he discusses technical and business issues relating to developing and deploying database applications.

Dr. David Johnson is managing director, Software Engineering at the Los Angeles Times. His group is responsible for developing the Times Web Publishing System bridging the print world with the ever changing web and facilitating interactions between the two. Prior to joining the Times, David led Software Engineering at Comcast Entertainment Group. His team was responsible for developing their Web Publishing System - driving eonline.com and mystyle.com, their Digital Asset Management System, as well as many internal broadcast software systems. David has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA where he developed methods for natural language processing, document summarization, search and content correlation. David and fellow researchers from UCLA founded Medaxis Corp., a medical information systems developer. David started his career working in the computer game industry as a programmer and game designer.

Rod is the father of Spring. The Spring Framework open source project began in February 2003, based on the Interface21 framework published with Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. Rod is one of the world's leading authorities on Java and J2EE development. He is a best-selling author, experienced consultant, and open source developer, as well as a popular conference speaker.

Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002) was one of the most influential books ever published on J2EE. The sequel, J2EE without EJB (July 2004, with Juergen Hoeller), has proven almost equally significant, establishing a comprehensive vision for lightweight, post-EJB J2EE development.

As Chief Products Officer, Paolo leads Openbravo's ERP product development organization. In this capacity, he coordinates with the Openbravo community to define the product roadmap, and is responsible for all engineering and integration projects in the ERP space.

Prior to joining Openbravo, Paolo was based in Redwood Shores, California, working for Oracle Corporation for over 14 years in applications development. Most recently he was a senior director leading the development of the Service product line. He also held a broad range of development and management roles within Oracle's Applications business, including positions in the Financials, Supply Chain Management, CRM and Business Intelligence development teams. Paolo also worked in Paris, France, as part of Oracle's Globalization team. Originally Italian, Paolo graduated from Politecnico di Milano with a degree in Electronic Engineering and a specialization in Software Engineering.

Eric Knorr is editor in chief at InfoWorld. He brings 20 years of technology journalism experience to the planning, development, and execution of feature articles that serve the needs of enterprise IT managers. Eric is the former editor of PC World magazine, the creator of the best-selling The PC Bible, a founding editor of CNET, and a veteran of several dot-com follies. A winner of the Neal and Computer Press Awards for journalistic excellence, he has written hundreds of articles on desktop and enterprise technology. He has a bachelor of arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Monica Kumar is senior director of Open Source Product Marketing at Oracle Corporation. She leads a team responsible for driving the product marketing, business development, and customer and sales strategies for Linux, virtualization, and Open Source at Oracle. She is also responsible for strategic marketing partnerships with hardware and software vendors. As an evangelist for Linux, virtualization and open source, Ms. Kumar often represents Oracle in customer, partner and industry events. Prior to her role in the Linux Program Office, Ms. Kumar managed global partner alliances as well as worked in Oracle’s Database Product Marketing and Server Technologies Division in various product marketing and product management roles. Prior to joining Oracle more than a decade ago, Ms. Kumar spent five years in various roles within the Product Marketing division at Informix Corp. Ms. Kumar has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a master’s degree in Business Administration.

Julian Lambert is the global e-business director at Shimano where he leads a core team responsible for all Web and enterprise content management activities. Julian keeps himself busy promoting open source technology within Shimano and is currently overseeing the rollout of Alfresco's open source content management system for Shimano worldwide. Prior to Shimano, Julian spent over 10 years as an e-business consultant focused on designing and implementing solutions for medium and large scale organizations, including companies such as Walgreen Co. and McDonald's Corporation.

Jack Lo is sr. director of R & D at VMware. Jack manages the VMware Virtual Machine Group, which is responsible for the core virtual hardware platform across VMware's virtualization products. Prior to joining VMware, Jack was at Transmeta Corporation for five years, where he held several engineering management positions, the most recent being director of Software Engineering. Jack received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington, and B.S./M.S. degrees in computer science from Stanford University.

Heather J. Meeker's practice focuses on intellectual property transactions for technology clients. Heather's clients cover a range of industries including software, communications, educational testing, computer equipment and medical devices. She has extensive experience in open source licensing strategies, and in intellectual property matters related to mergers and acquisitions. Heather regularly advises software and technology companies on how to comply with the open source requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Library General Public License (LGPL), Artistic License, BSD licenses, and other open source or "free software" licenses and how to structure open source business models.

Matthew Mengerink is vice president of core technologies for PayPal Inc., where he oversees architecture, infrastructure and real-time payments for 175 million PayPal accounts around the world. Matthew came to PayPal from eBay in 2003, where he served as director of technical strategy. He has been integral to developing the technology platform that enabled PayPal to expand its payment service to 190 markets around the world, and has helped drive site availability to more than 99.9 percent.

Matthew originally joined eBay in 2000 with eBay's acquisition of Half.com. He went on to drive various architecture and technology initiatives across the eBay Marketplace, including eBay's integration with the U.S. Postal Service and UPS shipping systems, the eBay content and globalization management systems, and the integration of the PayPal payment system into the eBay Marketplace. Matthew holds degrees in computer science and mathematics from University of Texas, Austin.

Mårten Mickos joined MySQL AB as CEO in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a start-up to the second-largest open source company and the fastest-growing database vendor in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.

Jeff Norman is a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Jeff's practice is focused on complex technology-related transactions and litigation. His experience includes working with private equity firms, Fortune 500 technology companies, and other rapidly growing computer hardware, software and pharmaceutical businesses.

Jeff leads negotiations and provides strategic advice in a variety of technology transactional contexts, including international and domestic joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, research and development, manufacturing, patent licensing, and software development and licensing. He also litigates software patent, trade secret, copyright, trademark and general commercial disputes. Jeff combines his insight into litigation with an extensive knowledge and understanding of technology, to enable clients to maximize the value of their intellectual property assets and avoid exposure to potential third party claims.

Stephen O'Grady is a principal analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, and addresses the full spectrum of infrastructure software from development to deployment, including operating systems, application languages and platforms, and database technologies, with a special focus on open source.

Before setting up RedMonk, Stephen assisted in building out the Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Portal knowledge set at Illuminata by drawing on his real world expertise in implementing such products for leading systems integrators. Prior to joining Illuminata, Stephen served in various senior capacities with large systems integration firms like Keane and boutique consultancies like Blue Hammock. Regularly cited in publications such as the New York Times, BusinessWeek, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal, and a popular speaker and moderator on the conference circuit, Stephen's advice and opinion is well respected throughout the industry.

Steven Pearson is the vice president of Advanced Technologies at CBS Interactive. In this role, he has developed the technology behind the CBS Audience Network - a syndication system for distributing ad-supported long and short form video content across the web. He also helped architect the infrastructure for MMOD (March Madness on Demand), the largest live video streaming event online. Before concentrating on CBS’s online video, he created an easy-to-use news content management and publishing system for cbsnews.com.

Previously, Steve worked at Sony Online Interactive where he helped develop thestation@sony.com - one of the largest multiplayer gaming platforms on the web at the time.

John Prendergast is a vice president at Jefferies & Company, Inc. in the Software, Services & Media Global Practice Group. Mr. Prendergast specializes in enterprise infrastructure, storage & security management, enterprise applications and middleware. He leads the firm's initiatives in the open source market. Over the past 13 years, Mr. Prendergast has been involved in the technology market as both an executive and advisor to many corporations, venture funds and entrepreneurs on strategies in the enterprise software market. Mr. Prendergast has completed transactions and corporate finance offerings involving JBoss, Sleepycat, Sourcefire, Oracle, Red Hat, and Progress Software. Prior to joining Jefferies, he worked in corporate finance at Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin and held numerous entrepreneurial management roles. He received an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Boston College.

Gianugo Rabellino is chief executive officer of Sourcesense, Europe's leading Open Source systems integrator. He has been at the forefront of the Open Source movement in Europe, founding the first official Italian Linux organization in 1994, and launching Orixo, the consortium of European Open Source companies. A Member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Rabellino serves as vice president of the Apache XML Project Management Committee, is a committer on several ASF projects including Cocoon, Xindice, and Jackrabbit, as well as mentor of the River project currently in development at the ASF Incubator. His highly charismatic presentations on topics such as Enterprise Open Source adoption, next-generation opportunities in Open Source, and building Open Development communities draws enthusiastic audiences at all levels at industry-leading events including JavaOne, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, and ApacheCon.

Mark Radcliffe is a partner and co-chair of the Technology and Sourcing Group of DLA Piper US LLP. He earned a B.S. in chemistry magna cum laude from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Mr. Radcliffe's practice focuses on representing corporations in their intellectual property and finance matters. He is chair of the Open Source Industry Group at the firm. He assisted Sun Microsystems in open sourcing the Solaris operating system and drafting the CDDL. And he represents many open source startup companies, including SugarCRM, Inc., Laszlo Systems, Inc. and Zimbra. He also serves as outside general counsel for the Open Source Initiative and is the chair of Committee C for the Free Software Foundation in reviewing GPLv3. Mr. Radcliffe has published articles in such legal magazines as the National Law Journal, Trademark World, Computer Lawyer, California Law Business and Copyright World.

Sam directs the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft doing primary research on various open source projects, and driving interoperability between Microsoft and key open source technologies. He leads Open Source Technology Strategy, including engaging with commercial Open Source companies like Novell, JBoss, Zend and SugarCRM, to help Microsoft advance our support for and understanding of the open source development, community, and marketing models.

Sam has led engineering teams building large-scale applications on Open Source software (at Ofoto.com) as well as hands-on development of client, client-server, and distributed applications on Unix, Windows, and Macintosh. Prior to his current role at Microsoft, Sam was a director of Emerging Business working on the Silicon Valley Campus where he managed relationships with Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs. Sam has held management and strategy positions at BEA Systems and Ofoto.com. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science from the University of California at San Diego.

Phil Robb is an R&D section manager in the Open Source & Linux Organization of Hewlett-Packard. In this role Phil leads several product development teams focused on Open Source Solutions and Open Source Governance. Phil also manages HP's Open Source Review Board which is the governing body within HP for all open source software usage and deployment. Prior to joining HP in 2001, Phil held engineering management and senior-architect positions at Critical Path, Fisher Scientific, Motorola, and Honeywell. Phil received a Bachelor's of Science degree in Management Information Systems from Bowling Green State University, and attended Colorado State University toward a Master's degree in Computer Science.

John Roberts, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of SugarCRM, is a pioneer in the enterprise software market. As co-founder of SugarCRM, John established SugarCRM's commercial open source business model, co-led the product design of SugarCRM products, and helped build the Sugar Community into one of the largest open source communities on the Web. With experience across marketing, business development and product management, John has established SugarCRM as the only viable alternative to established proprietary CRM solutions.

Prior to co-founding SugarCRM, John spent 14 years in various product management and sales engineering roles at leading CRM companies E.piphany, BroadVision, Baan/Aurum Software and IBM. John holds a BS in Business from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Lawrence Rosen is both an attorney and a computer specialist with deep roots in the open source community. He is founding partner of Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm that specializes in intellectual property protection, licensing, and business transactions for technology companies. In addition to this law practice, Larry also served for many years as general counsel and secretary of the non-profit Open Source Initiative (OSI). He currently advises many commercial open source companies and non-profit open source projects including the Apache Software Foundation. His book, Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law, was published by Prentice Hall in 2004. He was a Lecturer at Stanford Law School in 2005-2006.

Dave Rosenberg is the CEO and co-founder of MuleSource, the leading provider of open source integration software. Prior to founding MuleSource, Rosenberg served as chief information officer for Glass Lewis & Co., a leading investment research and proxy advisory firm. He also served as principal analyst for the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux.

Previously, Rosenberg was programs director for LinuxWorld and Comdex and held technology and marketing positions at Sprint, OmniSky and NorthPoint Communications. He contributes regularly to leading industry and business publications, including BusinessWeek, InfoWorld, Computerworld, CNET, ZDNet, Release 1.0, Slashdot and IBM DeveloperWorks. He authors the Negative Approach blog on CNet.com. Rosenberg holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

David Rossellat is a technical director at Electronic Arts. In this role, his responsibilities include leading the implementation of complex web applications such as community platforms, high traffic websites and other large-scale IT projects.

Prior to Electronic Arts, David Rossellat spent nine years in various technical and operational roles at leading digital agencies where he contributed to the successful delivery of a number of high profile websites for Fortune 500 clients including Lego, Nike, Activision, Warner Brothers and EA.

Roy Russo is helping LoopFuse to fulfill its vision and extend the adoption of demand generation solutions to marketing and sales organizations through an innovative open source business model. To this end Roy is responsible for overall strategy, management, and expansion.

Roy comes to LoopFuse following three years with JBoss/Red Hat where, as the co-founder of the JBoss Portal project, he led the successful incubation and launch of an enterprise portal product. Prior to JBoss, Roy worked at Sevista Messaging Technologies and SilverPOP, where he helped innovate the email marketing space over a five year process. Roy has a B.A. in Economics from Florida International University.

Linda P. Shih is vice president, Legal Affairs at Wind River Systems, Inc., a publicly-traded device software optimization (DSO) company with annual revenues exceeding $300 million. Wind River's DSO product solutions provide proprietary and open source (Linux) operating systems, along with middleware and tools, to customers who develop and distribute device products as varied as mobile handsets, automotive navigation and braking systems, set-top boxes, Internet routers, avionics control panels and coronary pacemakers.

Prior to Wind River, Linda was an attorney in the Technology Transactions practice group at Cooley Godward Kronish LLP's San Francisco office, and previously also was an attorney in the Corporate Securities & Technologies practice group at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP's San Francisco office. Linda received a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and a Juris Doctor from Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California at Berkeley).

Mark is founder of the Ubuntu Project, an enterprise Linux distribution that is freely available worldwide and has both cutting-edge desktop and enterprise server editions, and has become very popular.

Mark studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town, and went on to found Thawte, a company specializing in digital certificates and cryptography. He sold Thawte to U.S. company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. He moved to London in 2001, and began preparing for the First African in Space mission, training in Star City, Russia, and Khazakstan. In April 2002 Mark flew in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. In early 2004 he founded the Ubuntu project, which aims to produce a free, high quality desktop OS for everybody.

David Skok joined Matrix Partners as a general partner in May 2001. He has a wealth of experience running companies. David started his first company in 1977 at age 22. Since then David has founded a total of four separate companies and performed one turn around. Three of these companies went public. He joined Matrix from SilverStream Software, which he founded in June 1996. Prior to its July 2002 acquisition by Novell, SilverStream was a public company that had reached a revenue run rate in excess of $100m, with approximately 800 employees and offices in more than 20 countries around the world.

David's work as a value added investor is best known for helping JBoss take their Open Source business to a successful exit with their sale to Red Hat. He holds a B.SC Honours Degree in Computer Science from the University of Sussex, England.

Michael Skok joined North Bridge Venture Partners in 2002. Prior to this Michael had been an entrepreneur and CEO in the software business for over 20 years. Michael founded, led and attracted over $100m in private equity to his investments in several successful software companies ranging from CAD/CAM, Document Management, Workflow, Imaging and Collaboration, Security to Analytics and spanning the Mini Computer, Workstation, PC, Client Server and Internet eras.

Six companies were successfully acquired by Siebel, Platinum, Filenet, Banyan and IBM and two went Public, including Symantec for whom he built Symantec UK into their most profitable international business. Michael has served on many private and public company boards as well as supported various software industry groups such as the Software Publishers association where he was Chairman for a number of years in Europe. Michael is a graduate of Nottingham University in the United Kingdom.

Brad Smith is Microsoft's Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. He leads the company's Department of Legal and Corporate Affairs, which is responsible for all legal work and for government, industry and community affairs activities.

Smith has played a leading role at Microsoft on intellectual property, competition law, and other Internet legal and public policy issues. He is also the company's chief compliance officer. Since becoming general counsel in 2002, he has overseen numerous negotiations with governments and other companies, including Microsoft's 2002 antitrust settlement with state attorneys general, its 2002 data privacy negotiations with the Federal Trade Commission and European Commission, and agreements to address antitrust or IP issues with Time Warner, Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks, IBM and Novell. Smith is responsible for Microsoft's intellectual property work, including all of its IP portfolio, licensing and public policy activities.

Javier Soltero is co-founder and CEO of Hyperic, the leader in multi-platform, open source IT management. Prior to co-founding Hyperic, he was chief architect at Covalent Technologies, where he led the design and implementation of multiple enterprise products, including the configuration management product for Apache and the Covalent Application Manager - now Hyperic's flagship product Hyperic HQ. Prior to Covalent, Soltero was a senior software engineer at Backflip, where he met Hyperic co-founders Charles Lee and Doug MacEachern. At Backflip, he was actively involved in the design, implementation, and operational aspects of the site. Soltero also held senior engineering positions at Netscape, where he participated in the design development of e-commerce and Internet infrastructure suites. Soltero is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico and received his B.S. in Information Systems and Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Mark Spencer founded Linux Support Services in 1999 while still a Computer Engineering student at Auburn University. When faced with the high cost of buying a PBX, Mark simply used his Linux PC and knowledge of C code to write his own! This was the beginning of the world-wide phenomenon known as Asterisk, the open source PBX, and caused Mark to shift his business focus from Linux support to supporting Asterisk and opening up the telecom market! Linux Support Services is now known as Digium, and is bringing open source to the telecom market while gaining a foothold in the telecom industry.

Mark Spencer holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Auburn University, and is now president and CTO of Digium, Inc. He has also led the creation of several Linux-based open source applications, most notably Asterisk, the Open Source PBX, and Gaim Instant Messenger.

Andrew Updegrove is a co-founder and partner of the Boston law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP. Since 1988 he has worked with over 75 consortia, accredited standards development organizations and open source consortia, and has assisted many of the largest technology companies in the world in forming such organizations. He has testified before the United States Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission regarding consortia and standard setting, and has filed pro bono "friend of the court" briefs with the Federal Circuit Court, Supreme Court, and Federal Trade Commission on leading standards litigation. In 2002, he launched ConsortiumInfo.org, the most extensive resource on the Internet dedicated to consortia and standard setting, and the Consortium Standards Bulletin, a monthly e-Journal of news, ideas and analysis on standard setting that now has thousands of subscribers. The Standards Blog was added to ConsortiumInfo.org in 2005. He is a graduate of Yale University and the Cornell University Law School.

As executive vice president of products, Zack Urlocker oversees the definition, development and promotion of the company's entire family of open source databases and tools. In addition to software engineering and product management, he is responsible for MySQL's worldwide marketing, sales-lead generation, public relations and Web site. Zack is a veteran technology executive, with more than 20 years' enterprise software industry experience. Prior to joining MySQL AB, Zack held executive product management and marketing positions at Active Software, webMethods and Borland International.

As founder of XAware, Kirstan Vandersluis has been instrumental in designing technology to address data integration problems in a service-oriented manner. Mr. Vandersluis leads the XAware development group, and often implements integration solutions for XAware customers.

Robin Vasan currently sits on the boards of Alfresco, Centrify, GroundWork, Informance, TrueDemand and Webroot. Robin's notable past investments include Akimbi (acquired by VMware), Determina, webMethods, Riverbed Systems (acquired by Aether Systems), Global Logistics (acquired by Oracle) and Trigo Technologies (acquired by IBM).

Prior to joining Mayfield in 1999, Robin was a founder and/or key member of several successful software startups including CATS Software, Infinity Financial Technology, acquired by SunGard (SDS) and Risk Management Solutions. Robin earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A.S. dual degree in industrial engineering and economics from Stanford University. Robin is an avid athlete, who enjoys tennis, golf, basketball and snowboarding. He is a vocal supporter of Room to Read, a non-profit organization that builds schools and libraries in developing countries.

John Mark Walker has been a Free Software agitator, contributor, and in a previous life, developer. At VA Linux Systems, he survived an IPO and learned the ins and outs of Open Source politics. He then went on to stints at No Starch Press, GroundWork, and then IDG World Expo as the LinuxWorld conference director before landing at Hyperic, where he currently serves as community manager.

John Mark views the opening of software technologies as an inevitable expression of long-term economic trends driving down the price of commodity software and all commoditized knowledge, for that matter. His great quest is to figure out how to leverage the economies of scale driving the big picture into a micro-level view of successful community development for individual projects and companies. You can find his musings on Open Source at his blog, There is no Open Source Community: http://tinosc.blogspot.com/

Stephen Walli has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both a customer and vendor. He currently consults on software development business and open source strategy, and is the open-source-strategist-in-residence for Open Tuesday out of Finland.

Stephen was VP, Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, a business manager at Microsoft on open source, and VP, R+D and founder of Softway Systems, a venture-backed company that developed a UNIX portability environment for NT before being acquired by Microsoft. He was a long time participant and officer at the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991. Stephen has an essay in O'Reilly's Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. He blogs at http://stephesblog.blogs.com.

As Vice President of Marketing at Acquia, Jeff Whatcott leads all marketing activity for the company. Prior to joining Acquia, Jeff served as vice president of marketing and business development in Adobe's enterprise business unit, responsible for the open source Flex rich Internet application development framework and the LiveCycle business process platform. Prior to Adobe, Jeff held a variety of senior product leadership positions at Macromedia, and Allaire.

Jeff is a proven thought leader in platform technology strategy and a passionate advocate of the open source development model and community-centered marketing. He is a frequent public speaker and panelist on key topics including rich Internet applications, business process management, and social publishing. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and Master of Business Administration degree, both from Brigham Young University. Fluent in English and Japanese, Jeff has helped grow strong businesses and form successful alliances worldwide.

Jim Whitehurst has recently been named president and chief executive officer of Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Delta Airlines in 2002, serving in various roles, most recently as chief operating officer, responsible for Operations, Sales and Customer Service, Network and Revenue Management, Marketing and Corporate Strategy. Prior to joining Delta, Whitehurst served as vice president and director of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and held various leadership roles in its Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Atlanta offices.

A native of Columbus, Georgia, Whitehurst graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas, with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Economics. He also attended Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, holds a general course degree from the London School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Whitehurst, 40, is married with two children.

Jon Williams is the CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a division of Kaplan, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO). Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions is the first and leading provider of exam preparation and admissions services worldwide.

Williams brings over 20 years of relevant experience to Kaplan. Most recently, he was the CTO and senior vice president of Grey Healthcare. In this position, he managed all aspects of technology for the world's fifth largest healthcare communications company, including the launch of the company's e-business division. Prior to that, Williams served as a consultant and technology architect for clients including AOL Time Warner, Scholastic, Oxygen Media, and ATG. Originally from Australia, he has held a number of programming and project management posts overseas. Williams recently started a blog to share his technology management experience, http://weblog.infoworld.com/ny-cto. He received a degree in Computer Science from Melbourne University in 1983.

John Woolbright has over 15 years of experience in technology and the financial services industry. His experience includes Card Processing, Branch Automation, ATM, Items Processing, Core Bank Processing, Distributive Systems and E-Commerce Solutions. In addition to his current responsibilities overseeing network operations, information security and application development, John Woolbright is responsible for establishing the technology architecture and roadmap that will allow flexible and business driven integration of our customer facing and non-customer facing systems. John Woolbright was recognized in 2007 by Bank Technology News as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative People in Banking.

Raven Zachary is the open source research director for The 451 Group, an independent technology industry analyst company. At The 451 Group, he is responsible for the firm's Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service and ongoing open source coverage in the end user, vendor, investment, and development communities. Raven has been involved with open source as an end user, project contributor, journalist, consultant, and industry analyst for over ten years.

Jeremy has been with Yahoo! for over eight years. His Yahoo! career started with several years on the high-traffic Yahoo! Finance site, where he worked to make MySQL part of the site's core infrastructure in large batch operations, as well as real-time feed processing and serving content directly on the site.

He went on to become Yahoo!'s MySQL resident guru, working closely with Yahoo!'s many engineering groups on application design, architecture, database support, tuning and troubleshooting. He spent nine months working as an evangelist on the influencer marketing team in Yahoo! Search and helped to launch the Yahoo! Search blog and the Yahoo! Developer Network. He then spent a year as a founding member of Yahoo!'s Technology Development team before moving back into the Developer Network and leading the integration work on Yahoo's acquisition of MyBlogLog. He is the author of High Performance MySQL (published by O'Reilly in 2004) and blogs at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/.

Jim Zemlin, formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin also has a regular column in Enterprise Open Source Journal and is an advisor on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.